Ontario voters delivered a message on Thursday: sometimes people get so fed up with government, they’ll even vote for Doug Ford.

Ford led the Progressive Conservatives to victory in Ontario, as the polls indicated he would. Voting had barely ended, the television anchors had hardly a moment to rev up some excitement, the expert panelists had barely uttered their loyal party lines before it was all over: 15 minutes was all it took the networks to declare a Tory majority. OK, everyone, slowly now …. exhale.

The PC victory came despite some significant hurdles, many of which the leader and his team created for themselves: an uninspiring campaign, a patchwork platform, an inexperienced and often ill-informed leader and two other parties united in their disdain for him and all they feel he represents. He also won despite an overwhelmingly unimpressed media, which had largely passed judgement even before he failed to provide a campaign bus to ferry them from event to event. If we learned nothing else from the campaign, we learned this: people like me can scribble all we want, but voters will reach their own conclusions.

The basis of the Tory campaign was a blatant contradiction: a pledge to add billions of dollars in new spending while simultaneously reducing expenditures and eliminating the deficit

The Tories will now get their first chance to rule the province in 15 years. Whether they drew any lessons from that interregnum remains to be seen. Ford is their fifth leader since Mike Harris last won them an election, yet couldn’t put together a coherent set of policies on which to run. The basis of the Tory campaign was a blatant contradiction: a pledge to add billions of dollars in new spending while simultaneously reducing expenditures and eliminating the deficit. Having given him the opportunity to govern anyway, Ontarians can only hope he moves carefully before implementing his pledges. It’s all but certain there will be unappetizing surprises to be discovered in the rubble of the Liberal collapse. Ford said he was “very honoured, very humbled” to become premier; he could do worse than to temporarily shelve his priciest initiatives and focus on the concern that lies beneath much of the party’s core support, which is that the province faces a dire financial situation, and some serious work is needed to get it back on a footing solid enough to continue providing the many benefits and programs its people already enjoy. Unfortunately, buck a beer won’t be enough.

Ontario PC leader Doug Ford, left, hugs his mother Diane after winning the Ontario Provincial election to become the new premier in Toronto, on Thursday, June 7, 2018.Nathan Denette /
The Canadian Press

It’s not necessary to rampage around the province swinging an axe at spending programs to foster a return to some semblance of fiscal sanity, and the Tories would be wise to work at improving their image in any case. The politics of division has succeeded at nothing so much as antagonizing and alienating populations across the province, the country, the continent and for that matter the globe. Some Conservatives appear to glory in the role of the nasty party, the one that thinks “hard truths” means sorting people into friends and enemies, and treating them accordingly. It’s as much a blight to the right as arrogance is to the Liberals and credulousness is to New Democrats. There’s no law saying it has to remain that way.

While the Tories glory in their triumph, the NDP should take a serious look at itself. If they can’t win against a leader like Doug Ford, and with the Liberals out of contention, when can they win? In the final days of the campaign all sides agreed voters faced a stark choice between right and left. NDP leader Andrea Horwath warned of an apocalyptic Tory future of fired teachers, swollen unemployment rolls and shuttered hospitals. In its place she offered a utopian land of free dental care, free pharmacare, cheap daycare, tuition grants for all who need them and a cuddly new labour movement cured of its disruptive instincts by the sheer agreeableness of NDP rule. All at absolutely no cost to anyone except a few rich people thanks to the never-ending willingness of lenders to bankroll it all. And voters chose the PCs anyway.

While the Tories glory in their triumph, the NDP should take a serious look at itself. If they can’t win against a leader like Doug Ford, and with the Liberals out of contention, when can they win?

What does that tell you? Ontario, it appears, is simply not willing to bet the future on socialist theory. Too many Ontarians are too pragmatic to take the risk. The party’s new status as official opposition owes more to the Liberals’ collapse than to a sudden affection for Horwath and her troops. The party needs to greatly broaden its base if it hopes to hang onto its gains, otherwise it may suffer the same fate as its federal cousins once Jack Layton was gone and the Liberals had recovered.

And Ontario’s Liberals will almost certainly recover. They have four years to wash away the stains of the McGuinty and Wynne years and start over. Having lost so many of the culprits of those ugly years provides a relatively clean sheet to work with. Which is another reason the Tories need to use this opportunity to show Ontarians they are capable of reaching beyond their base, and repairing the damage of the Liberal regime. It took 15 years for voters to get fed up enough to dump the Liberals; nothing says they’ll wait so long with their successors.

When my assistant said there was a call from the White House, I picked up, said 'Hello' and started to ask if this was a prank

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